The Google Glass feature that (almost) no one is talking about is the experience  not of the user, but of everyone other than the user. A tweet by David Yee introduces it well:

There is a kid wearing Google Glasses at this restaurant which, until just now, used to be my favorite spot.

The key experiential question of Google Glass isn’t what it’s like to wear them, it’s what it’s like to be around someone else who’s wearing them. I’ll give an easy example. Your one-on-one conversation with someone wearing Google Glass is likely to be annoying, because you’ll suspect that you don’t have their undivided attention. And you can’t comfortably ask them to take the glasses off (especially when, inevitably, the device is integrated into prescription lenses). Finally  here’s where the problems really start  you don’t know if they’re taking a video of you.

Now pretend you don’t know a single person who wears Google Glass … and take a walk outside. Anywhere you go in public  any store, any sidewalk, any bus or subway  you’re liable to be recorded: audio and video. Fifty people on the bus might be Glassless, but if a single person wearing Glass gets on, you  and all 49 other passengers  could be recorded. Not just for a temporary throwaway video buffer, like a security camera, but recorded, stored permanently, and shared to the world.

Now, I know the response: “I’m recorded by security cameras all day, it doesn’t bother me, what’s the difference?” Hear me out  I’m not done. What makes Glass so unique is that it’s a Google project. And Google has the capacity to combine Glass with other technologies it owns.

First, take the video feeds from every Google Glass headset, worn by users worldwide. Regardless of whether video is only recorded temporarily, as in the first version of Glass, or always-on, as is certainly possible in future versions, the video all streams into Google’s own cloud of servers. Now add in facial recognition and the identity database that Google is building within Google Plus (with an emphasis on people’s accurate, real-world names): Google’s servers can process video files, at their leisure, to attempt identification on every person appearing in every video. And if Google Plus doesn’t sound like much, note that Mark Zuckerberg has already pledged that Facebook will develop apps for Glass.

Finally, consider the speech-to-text software that Google already employs, both in its servers and on the Glass devices themselves. Any audio in a video could, technically speaking, be converted to text, tagged to the individual who spoke it, and made fully searchable within Google’s search index.

Now our stage is set: not for what will happen, necessarily, but what I just want to point out could technically happen, by combining tools already available within Google.

Let’s return to the bus ride. It’s not a stretch to imagine that you could immediately be identified by that Google Glass user who gets on the bus and turns the camera toward you. Anything you say within earshot could be recorded, associated with the text, and tagged to your online identity. And stored in Google’s search index. Permanently.

I’m still not done.

The really interesting aspect is that all of the indexing, tagging, and storage could happen without the Google Glass user even requesting it. Any video taken by any Google Glass, anywhere, is likely to be stored on Google servers, where any post-processing (facial recognition, speech-to-text, etc.) could happen at the later request of Google, or any other corporate or governmental body, at any point in the future.

Remember when people were kind of creeped out by that car Google drove around to take pictures of your house? Most people got over it, because they got a nice StreetView feature in Google Maps as a result.

Google Glass is like one camera car for each of the thousands, possibly millions, of people who will wear the device  every single day, everywhere they go  on sidewalks, into restaurants, up elevators, around your office, into your home. From now on, starting today, anywhere you go within range of a Google Glass device, everything you do could be recorded and uploaded to Google’s cloud, and stored there for the rest of your life. You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do, you’ll have no way to stop it.

And that, my friends, is the experience that Google Glass creates. That is the experience we should be thinking about. The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience  it’s the experience of everyone else. The experience of being a citizen, in public, is about to change.

Some Seattle artist and I aren’t the only ones who think your pet should be life logging: the British government does too. Reading University has been commissioned to conduct a study of how much wildlife is being destroyed by domestic cats (McKie, Robin, “Special Tags to Measure How Often Cats Kill,” The Observer, 15 February 2009):

“For the first time, cats will be fitted with data loggers that will show their movements, range and behaviour 24 hours a day. We will know when one kills an animal — typically by the way it plays with its prey.

“We will then be able to work out precisely how many animals a cat is killing every year, and from that estimate a national figure. It will be a pretty formidable number.”

Now if they could just get some sort of pattern recognition software to read the live GPS data stream coming off your cat and tweet his kills to your cell phone, then your cat would be twittering too.

For this Seattle cat, photography is his medium, a gift from his “parents” — filmmakers Michael and Deirdre Cross, who gave him a very small and light digital camera that hung from his collar one day a week for a year. It was programmed to take a picture every two minutes.

They wanted the answer to a question many pet lovers have asked themselves: What does he do all day?

He came back with thousands of answers — 16 of which are framed and on display at the Urban Light Studios in the Greenwood Collective. The exhibit opens with a reception tonight as part of the Greenwood Art Walk. The show runs through March 10.

And while you’re at it, you may want to survey your environment for any particularly interesting non-living things, appliances, informational or gameworld agents, et cetera whose activities you might want to see in your FaceBook feed.

I am prone to say that there is a bigger issue at stake in something like life logging. As Carl Sagan pointed out in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, we’re all orphans abandoned at the doorstep of time. Ten thousand generations of humans have inhabited this planet and the most tenacious genealogist can perhaps recount seven of those generations. Indeed, your great grandchildren won’t even know your name. I recall one of Andy Rooney’s commentaries on 60 Minutes where he wandered through a number of old cemeteries, grown over, fences falling, headstones cracked and weathered to illegibility. It was obviously a very elegiac piece. He ended it by saying that we ought to make an indelible record of every person who’s ever lived. And we ought to. There was a time when we had to be pragmatic and pragmatism necessitated a massive forgetting. The realm of what’s pragmatic has grown. Time to stop forgetting.

I watch all the animals that scamper about the city and it is horrible that they lead such anonymous lives. They live beautifully without making an impression, they fall ill and there is no aid, they die without a thought from their fellows and their corpses are left where they fall. Once I saw a documentary in which a paleoanthropologist pulled a hominid skull out of a drawer and held it next to the skull of a saber-toothed tiger so that the two fangs of the tiger skull straddled the occipital bun of the human and lined up perfectly with two small holes in the back of the little human’s skull. Of those ten thousand generations, perhaps the majority were the lives of humans led as animals: noble, but uncelebrated lives of struggle leading to unmourned graves. Every one of those lives were ones of immense drama, and every one necessary to carry us down to the place we find ourselves today, and yet nearly to a one, utterly gone. And despite all our advancements, the lives of almost everyone alive today are not one iota less anonymous. In life, a titan; in death, dust.

Sometimes I am prone to a great man theory of history: that we masses are indebted for all of our modern day prosperity on an incredibly small number of geniuses without whom none of it would be possible. We common folk are parasites upon their achievements. But then I consider this world into which we are born. We just found it as it was, fully build. Massive buildings, sprawling cities whose assessed value runs to the trillions of dollars, public works projects the scale of which is baffling. I am dependent for my protection from the elements upon a building. Where this building came from, I have no idea. I have no idea who built it. I have no idea who first wanted it and commissioned its construction. I have no idea when the presumably original utility basement was remodeled into a living space. I have no idea how it was handed down and eventually would up with it’s present owner. As Graham Robb points out in The Discovery of France, even what we take to be untrammeled nature has already been drained, logged and contoured by generations so forgotten that we can no longer detect their impact. Countless trillions of person-hours have gone into making the world what it is, almost all of them completely forgotten. We just found the world as it is and don’t even consider it. It is Newton’s old, “If I have seen so far, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” There is a grandeur in the accumulated accomplishment of all the forgotten people who have carried the species down through the ages to deposit us were we have found ourselves. They should get their names etched in the base of their great accomplishment. Perhaps life logging will result in a certain solipsism, but in other sectors, perhaps it will chip away at a solipsism from which we already suffer.

But then, but then …

Atheism is more than just one belief about the nonexistence of the gods. It is a habit of mind. Once one has ceased to believe in god, one has only started to be an atheist. One must then purge one’s self of the thoughts that grow out of god. The need for eternity, the sole valuation of the eternal, the denigration of all things transient — in other words, the denigration of all things — is the most pernicious of such habits. There is obviously something to secularization thesis. Sometimes I think that this rage for permanence is just a bastion of my former Christianity. The insistence on the illusion of eternity is part of the myth of humanity as standing somehow opposed to and outside of nature. But we are as much animals and artifacts of nature now as ever. Perhaps we should live our lives like Buddhist sand mandala: exercises in the transient, in the timely. Coming to terms with becoming, evolution, development, decay and passing is how one is to be in harmony with the world, is it not?

Yes, yes, I agree with John that much of what you presently see that might fall under the rubric of life logging is either boring or pretentious or pornography. I really can’t even make it through the cream of such stuff, say, BloggingHeads. As for solipsism, there’s no sense in complaining: that’s our inevitable future. Suburbanization, materialism, the cultural conditions of capitalism et al. are merely the low tech predecessors to the coming introversion. But look past what it is today to the potential that it holds.

Don’t just imagine me sitting at home eating deli potato salad watching on a screen as Frank sits at home web browsing eating a microwave burrito. One person’s life log 24/7: not so interesting. But let’s cut it up and remix it. Imagine if everyone’s life stream was well marked up with metadata. It’s all timestamped and geotagged. Face recognition software tags all the people, perhaps place recognition software adds even more specific location data (H.M.S. Victory instead of just 50° 48′ North Latitude, 1° 06′ West Longitude). All conversations are parsed through speech to text and indexed. Stats on SIPs are tallied. User tags are attached to add to the raw machine indexes. Viewer rating and hit counts are recorded so we have some measures of quality or import. Now we’re ready for some serious use. And what will that consist of? Probably more than I can conceive, but just to toss off a few ideas:

Hindsight is 20/20. There’s really little problem determining in retrospect what was important and what not. The problem is having the foresight to know what’s important before the fact and be at the ready to capture it. If the technology is there (practically limitless storage) then dispense with the hard part of being clairvoyant about impending events and just record everything. We can edit it down later. And with no pressing limit, why not make it much, much later? Or why bother editing at all? In an earlier incarnation along this path, my thought was that what I wanted was complete sense data capture with, say, a ten minute buffer so that I could go back and edit down. But when the trend in data storage struck me, I thought why trade precious time for picayune space?

But actually hindsight is not 20/20. It only seems so under the sway of dogma. Really the past is inscrutable. There’s almost no telling what revaluation the endless mulling of the past might produce. In the perennial purges to which the raging simplifiers are want, the data trails of alternate narratives are eliminated. What seems inconsequential from one perspective is everything from another. The meager holdings of a peasant’s hovel, junk according to the great man theory of history, become the stuff of grand narrative at the hands of the archeologist. Who is to say what trend, indiscernible to us in the present, will grow to word-historical proportions in the future, or for that matter, what minutia will obsess future generations.

If you build it they will come. One of the interesting phenomena of the budding age is the growing degree of unintended consequences. If you’ve got something, even something unrefined, then put it out there and a bunch of content scavengers will come along with a mash-up of some sort and put it to a heretofore unanticipated good use. One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. What do we do with all that stuff? I don’t know, but my not knowing is not sufficient. Someone else knows. And that right there is a solid gold law of the Internet age. In a system of synergy, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, even inert garbage is a contribution to the potential of the system.

Rashomon. Human recall is notoriously unreliable. If you have five witnesses, you have five different versions of events. Life logging may bring some element of objectivity to things. And once you’ve set aside trying to figure out when to turn the recorder on and when to leave it off, catching the unexpected is less of a problem. Just think how much better When Animals Attack or Destroyed in Seconds television programming we’ll have.

Audience. There is, of course, the blatant issue of audience. Who do we log our lives for? As S. e-mailed me,

To the right audience, there is value. I would give a lot for the ability to look at a few moments (any moments) of the world from my eyes as a second grader. Or a few moments from the eyes of my great-great-grandmother.

Maybe my two year old self is not of any interest to strangers, but to my parents, to myself, to my children, my great grand children, it would be more valuable than the Zapruder film, the Omaha beach photographs, anything. As a man with a first baby on the way, I anticipate a wholesale reevaluation of your opinion as to what’s dull and forgettable and what important and in need of preservation.

And per observation number one, the audience is subject to change over time. If that second grader grows up to be an insurance salesman, than maybe interest remains confined to family. If he grows up to be the next Einstein or the next Hitler, than the audience becomes much larger and how valuable all those things are changes vastly.

The human sciences. Imagine just a few of the questions that the sociologist, the historian, the linguist, the political scientist, the antiquarian might be able to address with such a wealth of information at their disposal. The study of linguistic and meme evolution, presently confined to source material consisting of that most contrived medium, writing, would have a plethora of data. If nothing else, the study of nonce words would be revolutionized. Or think what it would do for the preservation of the dying languages and cultures. They could be preserved as they were lived, not as a graduate anthropology student’s field notes. As linguistic analysis tools become more sophisticated the empirical study of the structure of belief, moral practice and reasoning would become possible without the taint of self-consciousness interfering. Perhaps rhetoric would become a hard science. Historians have shifted their interest from great man and political history to people’s or cultural history, but prior to the fairly recent past, there’s almost nothing for them to go on. For developments in culinary practice, foods, cooking and eating tools, historians have to turn to paintings of banquets and study what’s on the table. What furnishings could you expect to find in a peasant’s house in the thirteenth century? Almost a complete mystery. There is worth in the preservation of the quotidian.

Searching and Sorting. Increasingly we will search and sort by ostension. And the join between me and what I’m looking for is other people. It’s Petabyte Age analytics applied to the issue of human interest. People are too complicated for a theory that delves into the internals, so just engage in atheoretic pattern matching, one person to another. This was damn near the first thing that I wrote about as a blogger (see the “theoretical discussion” of my “Inaugural Post,” 21 June 2004).

Information isn’t just produced and distributed (as if distribution was unproblematic). It’s vouched for, it’s filtered, it’s branded, it’s packaged with other information, it’s marketed and it’s mapped into a network. As the traditional means of these functions — newspapers, magazines, books, television stations — break down, they are being replaced by newer, more individualized methods. It used to be that a person would turn to their established sources — The New York Times, CNN, Cambridge University Press, et cetera. The editors at these institutions served the role of guaranteeing the veracity of information, of assembling a package of information desirable to a certain market segment, of providing the correct admixture of variability. But these were rather dumb packages aimed at gigantic demographics: the readership of The New York Times or the listeners of NPR. With the tools that the information age is making available, people are able to cut out the editor and design their own customized, unique information agglomerations.

There is so much going on out there in the world that I could never keep up on it all, so I rely on intermediaries. And really I don’t want to keep up on everything. I want intermediaries who are like me and so filter in things similar to the ones that I would select myself. But I don’t want people too much like me. I want some variety and I want to be exposed to new and unanticipated things. But not too much variety. There are some things that I’m absolutely not interested in. I want people who are different enough to introduce variety, but still sufficiently similar to introduce the right kind of variety. Specifying this in an abstract way is extremely difficult. What if you had to make up a list of tags or SIPs that you wanted to see? Could you think of them all? Do you have the time to pursue the Library of Congress subject catalog? And the problem of variety is that of an unknown unknown: most of the variety that I want is stuff in which I don’t yet know that I’m interested. To define this explicitly would be a chore and one that I probably couldn’t do very well through traditional means, so I do so by ostension.

And the way to do this is with a personally determined network of trust relationships. I subscribe to RSS feeds, I follow certain bloggers, I read my FaceBook News Feed, I add people to my “interesting library” list on LibraryThing, I trust people in recommendation systems like Amazon.com. Their purview becomes an extension of my own. Each node in my network of associations becomes like a radar picket, seeing out from one horizon to the next. They become my agents, recommending back to me the things in which I might be interested, in exchange for others doing the same for them.

It’s an extension of what’s always gone on. People have always got together and swapped information. They’ve relayed news and gossip, passed on leads on cheap produce, swapped how-to tips. In the past it was rather easy to find people who were into what you were into because there simply wasn’t that much to be into. There weren’t many games, there wasn’t much by way of entertainment, there were fewer hobbies, there weren’t as many job opportunities because the scope of economic activity was narrower, the publishing industry was small. But just as our culture fractures into ever more narrow segments, so our ability to reach out broadens. Our capability to establish similar such relationships is no longer confined to our immediate surroundings and our geographic neighbors. It now extends over the globe and to our ideologically proximate neighbors.

But if we are to apply Petabyte Age analytics to people, first what we require are the petabytes. In order for other people to serve an ostensive role, they have to make their information available: what they are doing, what events they are attending, what they are reading, what they are watching, what they are purchasing, what they think about all these things. Only then can one start to make determinations about whose life signature to include as part of one’s search criteria and only then do they produce the information to draw into the vortex that is you. Life logging-like behavior is a critical component of search by ostension.

Environmental awareness. Generalized sights like outside.in and EveryBlock try to provide people with information specific to their locality. Sights like Menu Pix or Indie Coffee Shops do the same with respect to particular categories of interest. This is an extension of searching by ostension, only instead of like-minde people, I am interested in like-located people.

Imagine what life logging would mean for augmented reality. What happens to a cityscape when standing in front of a building, I have the design discussions of the architect and the client, the experience of the laborers who built it, reactions of architecture critics, views of what preceded it on the lot all at my disposal. Imagine being in a new city and having the whisperings of previous visitors or longtime residents in your ear. People often say, “imagine if these walls could talk.” In the future, they will.

The long tail of entertainment. To apply a straightforward materialist analysis to it, life logging is essentially a long tail phenomenon. Production and distribution of content — news, entertainment, educational, documentary — used to entail significant costs, both opportunity and financial. There was only a little bit of bandwidth and fully equipped and staffed studios and broadcast stations were extremely expensive so producers stuck to the safe side of the 80/20 rule. They went with the lowest common denominator of programming to maximize return on bandwidth expended. As the price of production, storage and distribution fall and the learning curve flattens out, what makes the cut will move comparably further down the long tail. Do you think that a thousand television channels are too many? How about one for every man, woman and child in the world? How narrow will a niche become? It’s the other side of the question of how low will production and distribution costs go. Will it go so low that the niche audience shrinks to a single person? I don’t think that even that is the limit. Probably the remote possibility of a single view or incorporation of a minute fragment of one’s output into a larger work is the limit.

Of course people’s level of interest in participation will be a limit, but as it becomes ever easier — so easy that participation is almost indistinguishable from nonparticipation — it will eventually require active rejection to not participate. And then society might develop positive inducements to overcome even that. There’s always the dreaded network effects, but one can imagine much more stringent inducements. Not having a life log might make a person a social pariah or a life log might serve in place of a curriculum vitae or a portfolio.

Personality as entertainment. Already I think in programs like No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain, Man vs. Wild, MythBusters, The Rachael Ray Show, fill in your favorite example — and I know you have one — we are seeing the maturation of reality television into personality-based programming and hence a limited form of life logging. Already the focus of these shows isn’t a premise or a regular subject, so much as the featured personality. Yeah, sure, each theme-based channel — the Food Network, HGTV, Discovery — picks someone relevant to their brand and that’s cute and all, but at this point I suspect unnecessary. For all your boredom at the medium, a person with a well developed shtick is a person with entertainment potential. And already that’s widely the case with many a medium. Whether it’s Christiane Amanpour, Rick Steves, David Brooks, Matt Drudge, Ann Coulter or the Crocodile Hunter, people tune in for the personae as much as any of the other content.

And regarding the expansion of personality-based programming into a more generalized life logging, is our meritocracy already so frictionlessly efficient that there are no overlooked talents, eccentrics, geniuses, subversives, whatnot left to be discovered? There’s a word for it already: micro-celebrity. It was the second thing I ever blogged about (“William Gibson’s Idoru and Blogging,” smarties, 21 June 2004). Yeah, sure, some of this is boring, but some shows get cancelled too.

The Zeitgeist becomes tangible. Imagine being able to request a twenty minute medley of the top 100 conversations conducted at my comprehension level on a topic, say consciousness or string theory, over the last six months. You could scan the thoughts of humanity like you presently do radio stations on your car stereo. We’re stitching together the universal consciousness here. For that to happen our thoughts have to stop happening in isolation or small factions and occur in a unified intellectual space.

Was that what you had in mind, John, when you wrote that you were taking a risk dissenting against me?

S. and I are very interested in lifecasting, life streaming, life logging, life blogging or whatever you want to call it. We are doing some early investigations of technologies, techniques and approaches. Meanwhile, I see that our friend Frank has moved on to the experimentation phase (“August 27, 2008: A Day in the Life,” Too Frank?, 27 August 2008). I also notice a number of visits to Starbucks throughout Frank’s day.

I’m completely unsure what to do at this point. I don’t think I want to have to explain in my next job interview why I’m wearing some gigantic helmet that makes me look like a borg special child. Alternately, it could be as simple as a palmtop with a built-in digital camera and a flickr account.

The lifecasting Wikipedia page has lots of leads to life logging resources, but my two favorites don’t make the list — they are pretty simple. First, I am deeply impressed by Noah Kalina’sEvery Day, where he made a six minute stream out of 2,356 photos, taken one per day from 11 January 2000 – 31 July 2006. I think in his case it’s half the music that makes his project seem so profound. Mr. Kalina has prompted a number of both cool and humorous imitators, with a photo a day during the nine months of a pregnancy seeming a particularly poignant use of this documentary form. Second is Jamie Livingston who took a Polaroid photo every day starting 31 March 1979 until 25 October 1997, the day before he died of a brain tumor at the age of 41. Mr. Livingston didn’t usually take self-portraits, just a picture of what was going on around him. Chris Higgins has a good digest of photos, especially the biographical ones, from the collection along with some background information (“He Took a Polaroid Every Day, Until the Day He Died,” mental_floss, 21 May 2008). Also a powerful collection.

I was overhearing someone the other day at the table next to me explain to his dining partner that it’s only a matter of time before data storage miniaturization allows us all to carry around enough storage to record our entire lives. Of course universal wireless will probably beat hard disks to the punch and anyway you wouldn’t want to be carrying around something that important and sensitive in your pocket. You’ll want something a little more secure and fault-tolerant. Whatever the case, the day is coming and I suspect that it will be epoch-defining. One day we will look back and marvel that at one time everyone just let their lives slip away into oblivion “like tears in rain.” I’d like to get a jump on it.